A man named Something commits suicide, and in his last moments before death, he is greeted by a wispy unnamed being. He is scalded by this ghostly looking figure and called an idiot for wasting his life. He gets a brief summery of the strange world he appears to be in. Spirits roam here waiting to latch onto a new born's conscious. A majority of humans have spirits from past lives in them, but no one can hear, nor talk to them. But this changes for the first time in history. After what felt like several minutes, in reality being several days, Something wakes up in a hotel bed. He soon recovers and returns to his apparent to think he wasn't the only one there. Fearful of an intruder, he hides away in a panic room, and in this silence, he realizes the sounds were coming from his head. His own spirits and all the ones from the one he met in the spirit world were arguing. He finds that thinking in his mind was the way to talk back to them. The spirits need their own body, and sharing one was cramped. He starts to go mad, and the voices in his head cry for help. All he could think of the get the spirits out of him, was murder. He uses people for experiments for how to get one spirit from one person to another. They usually die on his hands, or try to escape, also making them die on his hands. His last resort is a double suicide, what brought him into this bloody mess in the fist place. If he finds one of these people that don't have spirits with them, if he dies with them, that with even out the amount of spirits to bodies. As he's falling off a cliff with the person he befriended, he looks up to see that they didn't jump. The story ends with a group of police officers in a room looking at his police records. They exclaim how crazy he was, and lines him up with other criminals, subtly telling the reader that murderers and criminals alike are like that because they have too many spirits, and it's a normal thing that happens.
Struggles have never been so beautiful. TENDER by FULLOFMOON is an exploration of the human experience, delving into abstract yet universal struggles. Through experimental use of various literary devices, classical references, political theories, economic concepts, and diverse structures, it addresses uncomfortable emotions, world systems, existential questions, and infatuations (with people, things, and the self.) By employing relatable subject matter and simple language, TENDER seeks to show how deeply beautiful our tender encounters truly are.
Book cover photo credits: Reylia Slaby - Dagny Tarver